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Understanding 9/11Regular Contact With Anyone Interested: Documents of the Society for the Study of Speciation
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Joe Cain (ed.). 2007. Regular Contact With Anyone Interested: Documents of the Society for the Study of Speciation (London: Euston Grove Press). ISBN 9781906267001
Organising the Society for the Study of Speciation was a simple affair in 1939. The job of implementing its vision fell upon the entomologist Alfred Emerson, recruited to serve as Secretary. 'The need was felt by many students of speciation for a greater degree of integration between the various fields,' he wrote.
“Those contributing to an understanding of the factors influencing speciation are often in fields and institutions which have little direct contact with those who are attacking the problem from somewhat different angles and are using different techniques .... The general object of the Society [will be] to institute an informal information service which will tend to correlate the various approaches.”
Emerson posted the Society's first batch of material in March 1941. This featured a 29-page news bulletin, including a specially written review of Julian Huxley's 'highly important' book,
New Systematics, as well as an address list for the Society's 374 members and a colossal 1,250-item bibliography listing relevant papers since 1938. The bibliography provides a fascinating cross section of research into speciation during the late 1930s, organised in ways Emerson thought appropriate for this fast-developing topic.
Viewed from a distance, the Society was off to a strong start. But such optimism was mistaken. Emerson's first communication was the Society's last. By 1942, it was dead.
Regular Contact with Anyone Interested reprints these little-known documents Emerson circulated in 1941. These are the first and only materials distributed on behalf of the Society for the Study of Speciation. Few copies have survived the intervening years, and these have been used only rarely by historians interested in evolutionary theory. To these original documents, Cain has added a brief introduction as well as some clarifying notes and a summary of his detailed analysis of the Society's membership.
